About the speaker:
Will Kaufman is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Central Lancashire. His areas of expertise include American comedy, the culture of the American Civil War, transatlantic studies, the American 1970s, and American protest music. One of the UK’s senior scholars in American Studies, he has served on the executive committee of the British Association for American Studies and has been Vice-Chair of the Association. He is also a co-founder of the Maastricht (now Middelburg) Centre for Transatlantic Studies in the Netherlands.
Will’s critically acclaimed publications include The Comedian As Confidence Man (1997), The Civil War in American Culture (2006), and American Culture in the 1970s (2009). As a recipient of a Woody Guthrie Research Fellowship from the Broadcast Music Industry Foundation and the Woody Guthrie Foundation, he has written the first political biography of America’s national balladeer: Woody Guthrie, American Radical (2011).
Will is a professional folksinger and multi-instrumentalist, with a life-long passion for American folk music. He has toured Europe and the United States with a pair of live musical documentaries: ‘Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travelin’’ and ‘All You Jim Crow Fascists! Woody Guthrie’s Freedom Songs’. Performed at the Glastonbury Festival, the Bath International Music Festival, the Whitby Folk Festival, and the Chester Literature Festival, as well as hundreds of music venues on both sides of the Atlantic, the documentaries have attracted the praise of Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Ry Cooder, Ralph McTell, Martin Carthy, and Christy Moore.
 |
 |